Harper took a deep breath, looked at his outstretched arm, then took her shot, knocking his puck off the table.
“Stay away from her.”
Seeing the two of them together again, Grace hurried over.
As she walked up, Jamie spun around and spanked Grace’s ass.
Without hesitation, Harper slammed her bottle down onto the table, spraying beer everywhere, and stormed after Jamie.
Grace was the one in shock now as Harper grabbed him by the shirt.
“Don’t you ever slap her again you mother fucking piece of shit.”Getting between them, Grace broke it up before it went any further. “Harper. Stop.”
“How can you let him treat you like that? Like a piece of meat.”
Jamie was laughing again, his MO for the night. His buddies were gathered around too, trying to make sense of it all.
With serious effort, Grace dragged Harper toward the exit.
“She’s had too much to drink. I’m taking her home,” Grace said, grabbing their purses.
“I have not!” Harper yelled, the straps of her ball gown off to her elbows.
Looking around the bar, Harper saw that the patrons were silent, watching the drama unfold at the shuffleboard table and now at the door.
The show continued in the parking lot as Grace tried to get Harper in the car.
“I’m not done with him!” Harper roared. Grace pushed her into the passenger seat.
Once she got the doors locked and the car started, Grace peeled out of the strip mall where Ernie’s was the anchor tenant.
“What the hell was that?” Grace demanded.
“He fucking slapped your ass. You should’ve heard the things he was saying earlier.”
“Harper. You can’t go around acting like that,” Grace said, heatedly. “It was embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing?” Harper’s breathing was labored. “I embarrass you?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Why do you like him? He’s such an arrogant douche bag.
What does he have that I don’t?”
“Is that what this is about? You think I want to be with Jamie?”
Harper’s anger dissolved into tears. “I don’t want to lose you.
And I fucking hate him.”
“Sweetie, you have NOTHING to worry about. I love you. I
0
want to be with you. Not him. Remember, it’s all about us.”
With these words, Harper flashed on Grace and Nico by the fire at Halloween, the way she flirted, the way she fed him a cracker and licked his finger.
“Who’d want to be with someone like him anyway?” Grace asked. “Jamie’s a prissy prima donna.”
Harper put her head on Grace’s shoulder.
“We’ve got to be careful,” Grace whispered, kissing the top of Harper’s forehead.
“I don’t feel good,” Harper mumbled.
As they drove through the golf course together, they watched the dashboard temperature gauge drop near the lake. The slippery haze emanating from the distance was as cool as the summer’s first rain, giving the greens its nightly nourishment and the water an ominous breath of moisture.
Over the purring engine, Harper could hear the CDs shuffling in the trunk disc player; Grace was still searching for the right song.
Grace was soft in the headlight’s reflection and, looking at her, Harper wondered how they’d ever fallen in love. Two girls.
Two sorority sisters. They weren’t supposed to be lovers.
Whatever were they going to do?
“How did this happen?” Harper asked. “How did we get here?”
Grace downshifted into second as she turned onto her street.
“I don’t know and—” she smiled, shook her head—“I don’t care.”
Harper reached for Grace’s hand on the stick shift and raised it to her lips.
“I love you,” Grace said, her Donna Karan perfume still strong. As Harper kissed where their fingers intertwined, Grace looked down with eyes Harper rarely got in the company of others.
“We’ll die old maids, Bella, I promise,” Grace said. “No one will ever know.”
“The Carnival Is Over”
Dead Can Dance
Considering what happened with Cilla, combined with her bizarre conversation with Dean, she should’ve listened to her intuition and gone home. But she was drunk and Grace insisted she stay. Grace had an early morning riding lesson and she desperately wanted them to sleep in each other’s arms.
Next to Grace in her twin bed, Harper woke from a nightmare in the middle of the night and then again about an hour later, sweaty and terrified. In her dreams, she was running from a Doberman, nearly escaping before it caught her. The first time in the driveway, the second time on the front steps. Each time Harper got closer to safety. Harper could see Nonna in the window while the dog pulled her toward the desert, where others were waiting, howling. Even after Harper woke up beside Grace, she could still feel the rocks against her back, the dog’s coarse fur under her fingernails.
At some point when it was still dark, Harper got up to pee. In her tired stupor, she hadn’t bothered to look at the clock. She’d purposefully set the alarm for five, planning to leave on Grace’s bike before the house stirred. It was Christmas Eve.
From one nightmare to the next, Harper would never forget
Cilla’s deep voice early that morning as she stood in the bathroom pulling up her underwear, half asleep.
“Wake up. You’re late.” Harper looked at the small clock glowing by the sink and saw that it was nearly seven.
Standing in the dark, just behind the door, feet away, Harper didn’t move as Cilla shook Grace awake. There was urgency in her voice.
Harper held her breath as she watched the light come on in the adjacent room, able to see it all through an inch-wide crack at the doorjamb.
“What?” Grace said, disoriented. “Where did you get that key?” She looked around for Harper.
“Get up,” Cilla said, making room on the bed. “We need to talk.”
Harper had heard Cilla badger Grace before—skipping Mass, leaving dirty dishes in the sink, staying out too late—but immediately Harper feared the worst. This felt different.
“I found this card from Harper in your organizer,” she said.
“When I came in your room yesterday, it was sticking out.”
The glare at the ball had been directed at her, Harper suddenly realized.
As Harper waited for more, she knew it was her Christmas card that Cilla found; the one she’d given Grace before they left Tucson with the sonnet folded inside. Harper saw Grace tuck it into her Daytimer the morning they pushed off.
“You know,”—Harper heard the envelope opening—“this is really disturbing.” Cilla paused, for effect. “I think you should be leery of Harper. Some of the things she wrote here are not the sort of things friends with normal feelings write each other.” She talked to Grace like she was still a child.
“How dare you go through my things!” Grace yelled.
When Grace broke her silence, Harper brought her hands to her face and covered her mouth.
Cilla ignored Grace’s attack and continued with a sharper tone, a higher volume. “Giving you a love poem? Saying that you’re everything? That she’s never loved anything more? This is disgusting,” she said. “And it isn’t right.”
“Mother!”
“She parties too much, and,” Cilla paused again, “I hear she does drugs. She’s a terrible influence and I don’t want you hanging out with her anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace shouted even louder.
Shaking now, Harper wedged herself further behind the door.“Besides all that, Sloan’s mom recently told me some things that have made me question Harper…and then to find this letter?
You need to stop spending time with her.” The bed squeaked as she stood.
Stop spending time with me? Harper thought. A terrible in
fluence? How could she say those things?
“I’m going to flush this down the toilet,” Cilla said.
Grace jumped from her bed and stopped her mother as she touched the bathroom door. Harper braced herself.
“Don’t you dare,” Grace said slowly. Harper heard paper rip.
“Get out of my room!”
Cilla conceded, and finally turned to leave. Her voice was still loud from the door when she added, “Grace listen. Mrs.
Weasle told me there are rumors swirling around the university about you and Harper. Someone found photos or something.
I know, it’s absurd.” Cilla dismissed the gossip immediately.
“Quite frankly, though,” she paused, “we’re afraid Harper is a lesbian.”
BOOM.
Everything exploded. Imploded. And Harper caved into herself.
“The feelings she has for you are not normal or healthy.
Need I remind you what Granddaddy’s will says?”
Harper immediately flashed on old, fat women she’d seen sitting at Ernie’s bar, PE coaches from her past and scary dykes at truck stops she’d seen in the bathroom during family road trips.And then she saw her second-grade teacher, Miss Jensen, her blond hair and tan legs, all the afternoons Harper stayed after school to help grade papers.
Harper suddenly pictured the first time she had sex with Rich. He had been gentle and afraid. They both were as they
lost their virginity that summer night, when the temperature was high and they decided they were in love. To her, his dick was a like an animal Harper had never seen before—not an object of carnal desire, which she neither wanted nor despised. She wanted to put it in a box and study it, not have sex with it.
Harper continued to fade. Grace and Cilla were suddenly far away. Muffled now, a distant fight she could barely hear, Grace screamed at her mother. “What the hell are you talking about?
That is ridiculous!” Grace yelled. “And I’m an adult, MOTHER.
You can’t tell me who to be friends with. Get out of my goddamn room.”
Harper hadn’t heard Grace swear at her mom before and she’d never seen her that angry. Behind the towels, Harper began crying. How could they be saying such horrible things?
In all the years, Harper had never put a word on what she felt. And hearing it this way made her sick.
After Cilla stormed out, Grace slammed the door and stuck the desk chair under its handle. She flipped on the TV and turned up the volume.
Harper’s face was soaked in sweat when she dropped to her knees at the toilet. Grace held Harper’s hair as she spit into the bowl, apologizing for what her mom said.
When Harper was done dry-heaving, she wiped her mouth and leaned into the wall between the vanity and the sink. Sitting across from her, only three feet away, Grace was distant and pale.
As traumatized as Harper.
Ten minutes later, Harper cut through the laurel bushes along the Dunlop driveway, escaping through the neighbor’s yard.
Grace picked her up a block away in her riding outfit. Grace was tucking her breeches into her field boots when Harper jumped into the convertible.
“Tell me you destroyed those photos,” Grace said, as pallid as the overcast sky.
“They’re at the apartment,” Harper said, even whiter than Grace.
“What could she have been talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Harper said
Grace let out a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry you had to hear those things,” she said.
Harper was in a daze, lost in the morning horizon. Everything was coming unraveled. And fast.
“What are we gonna do?” Harper finally muttered.
“Don’t worry,” Grace promised. Firm. “I’ll clear this up.”
Grace grabbed Harper’s hand as they pulled into her driveway. “Everything will be fine.” She declared, “Of course you’re not a lesbian.”
“Fire”
The Pointer Sisters
Harper was on edge all day, even with the gaiety of the season upon them. She kept the landline cordless phone in her back pocket all day in case Grace called, and helped Ana and Nonna, who was wearing a bejeweled Christmas sweater, dress the tree with tinsel.
By four, there was still no word from Grace. She hoped they could talk before dinner; there was a chance they’d run into each other at the country club.
Every year from the time they had met, Grace had sneaked over on Christmas Eve and knocked on Harper’s window right as the clock struck twelve. It had become a tradition of sorts, as much as anything for her—like stockings, the tree, even Santa.
Would Grace show up this time?
After dinner at the country club, where she saw Grace from a distance as they were leaving, Harper paced her bedroom in wait.
Would she come?
What would they do about Cilla?
Would she eventually get in touch with Harper’s mom?
How far had the gossip spread?
The more Harper agonized and replayed the dreadful events of the morning, the more she panicked.
I’m not a dyke, Harper insisted. The rumor was absurd.
Grace and I are just friends. Best friends. Things may’ve gone further than most friendships, but we certainly weren’t gay.
Around eleven, Harper dug her European journal out of her hope chest and reorganized Grace’s letters, Italian parchment bound with string. In her room, she lit a candle and slid into a chair next to her bay window overlooking the moonlit desert.
Just having the journal, which was scratched to hell, in her hands stirred all kinds of emotions; longing mostly, but also a bit of melancholy. And now fear.
She started at the beginning. Carefully, she read each page, not missing a word, a scribble, a splash of coffee, a smudge of ash. She analyzed the marks, the scribbles, the drawings—what was my thought process, my sublimated message, she wondered.
She struggled to make sense of it all, the layers underneath the entries.
She dog-eared the most evocative passages, intending to go back and reread them. How had things ended up this way? The two of them in love.
As Harper read, her mounting desperation was overwhelming. The swelling inside her chest made it hard to breathe. The room was getting smaller.
Lying there, she prayed the signs were wrong. She and Grace were in love, yeah, but it was a fluke, a cosmic accident.
She definitely wasn’t a lesbian.
With an Exacto blade, Harper sliced the marked pages out of her journal and wadded them into balls before tossing them to the floor. They littered the room like pages cast from a manuscript—a character, a plotline axed.
Even though her parents were asleep, she locked her door when she dug even deeper into her hope chest and pulled out her childhood diaries. Religiously, she’d written in them every night during her youth, even if just a few sentences. It had been mostly
a log of sorts, a record of her daily activities. But as she got older, the pages began to pull her further in, unintentionally exploring emotion and motivation in telling ways.
Thumbing through diary after diary, Harper was shaken by Grace and her presence on the pages. She was everywhere.
After she was done scrutinizing her old diaries, Harper christened a new journal, its pages crisp like a stack of fresh dollar bills.
I’m lost, Harper scribbled. Completely lost. I have no idea which way to go. Grace is everything.
Harper chewed on the end of her pen, worrying about what it all meant, even about committing it to paper.
How could her mom say such horrible things? What if I lose Grace?
What if she never wants to see me again?
As Harper wrote, the thought of being without Grace was so devastating, she could hardly write the words. She vowed, on the pages of her journal, to do anything she could to keep Grace close—even if it meant running away.
When she was done, Harper cut those new pages out, too, and with her shirt, scooped up t
he crumpled sheets and headed to the garage, where she found a can of lighter fluid under her dad’s workbench.
In the powdered dust of starlight, just Harper and the universe, she dumped the papers into the fire pit near the tennis court. The frigid air smelled like the stars.
Will I regret this one day, Harper wondered.
Before she saturated her shame, Harper stood over it and gave herself a final chance. This is it. Once it’s done, it’s done.
There’s no turning back.
As Harper breathed, little steam clouds escaped from her mouth. Even in the darkness, she could see the Saltillo tile around the pit’s edge, the same tile on the lip of the pool and the courtside gazebo. Carefully, she’d helped her dad lay each Mexican square; she’d watched the measured way he put them in order, the way he used his level, keeping everything straight.
It was finally time.
Harper emptied the can, pulled out a matchbook and stepped back.
Poof.
After an explosive plume, the papers caught ablaze like a firecracker’s tail, angry and irreversible. Orange cinders dissolved into the desert sky.
She’d carved out the heart of the European journal, so she decided to burn the whole thing. When she dropped it into the pit, the leather squelched the flames and tried to kill the fire. It knew better than she did—the truth can never be destroyed, no matter how much lighter fluid you put on it. Harper squatted on the edge of the fire pit and watched the words dying and soft disappear into the red heat of the fire. My bed is lonely without you. Crouching near the dying flames, Harper heard rustling in the shrubs. She looked at her watch; Grace was right on time.
Midnight, straight up.
When Grace pushed through the bushes, Harper saw her blond hair shimmering in the firelight. She closed her eyes.
Her prayer had been answered.
In the kitchen, mulled cider had been brewing for hours.
Harper rifled through the drawer for a ladle while Grace grabbed two cups. They’d hardly spoken after their long embrace. As Harper filled each mug, she wondered what Grace was thinking, where she was at.
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